Explicature and implicature
Sperber and Wilson follow the formal view in distinguishing between what they call explicature and implicature. The term ‘explicature’ describes an assumption that is explicitly communicated. In relating to explicit or context independent meaning, this term roughly corresponds to the traditional idea of semantic meaning. The term ‘implicature’, which is adopted from Grice (1975), relates to implicit or inferential (context-dependent) meaning, and corresponds to the traditional view of pragmatic meaning. Sperber and Wilson also follow the standard formal view in assuming that semantic ‘decoding’ takes place prior to the calculation of pragmatic inferences. However, they depart from the standard formal view in arguing that meaning construction relies to considerable extent upon inference, even in the ‘decoding’ of explicatures. This idea is illustrated by example (20) from Sperber and Wilson (1995: 186).
This sentence is straightforwardly interpreted to mean that a child left a ‘drinking tube’ in a glass drinking vessel. This meaning is the explicature expressed by the sentence. However, as Sperber and Wilson observe, even this straight forward sentence requires some inferential work, because the expression straw is lexically ambiguous: it could mean the child left a ‘cereal stalk’ in the glass. To derive the more likely or accessible ‘drinking tube’ interpretation, the hearer has to access encyclopaedic information relating to children and the typical scenarios involving a ‘straw’ and a ‘glass’. The availability of the most salient interpretation might also depend on contextual information, such as whether the child in question was in a kitchen or a farmyard. As this example illustrates, many explicatures will rely upon inference on the part of the hearer in order to retrieve the intended meaning. Indeed, all explicatures containing referential expressions like that man or him rely upon inference for reference assign ment: matching a referring expression with the ‘right’ entity. Sperber and Wilson’s model therefore departs from the standard formal model in emphasising the role of inference in deriving explicit meaning. The exchange in example (21) illustrates how an implicature is derived (Sperber and Wilson 1995: 194).
In this exchange, Mary fails to answer Peter’s question directly (because Peter’s utterance is a ‘yes-no question’ a straightforward ‘yes’ or ‘no’ would provide a direct answer). The presumption of relevance allows Peter to assume that Mary has answered the question in the most relevant way possible and to infer her intended meaning. Mary’s utterance interacts with Peter’s encyclopaedic knowledge and gives rise to the fact that a Mercedes is an expensive car. This fact interacts with Mary’s assertion that she wouldn’t drive ANY expensive car, and by a process of logical deduction gives rise to the explicature that Mary wouldn’t drive a Mercedes. Mary’s utterance counts as the optimally relevant way of answering Peter’s question because it is maximally informative. Her utterance gives rise to a greater number of contextual effects than a direct ‘no’ response, because Peter now knows not only that Mary wouldn’t drive a Mercedes, but also that she wouldn’t drive a BMW, a Bentley, a Jaguar and so on. From this perspective, the extra effort or processing ‘cost’ involved in the retrieval of the implicature(s) is rewarded by the ‘benefit’ of a greater number of contextual effects.
